New York does not have official English, and it does not allow referenda or voter initiatives.
In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was elected after promising to scrap the city’s bilingual education programs, but he has since decided to greatly increase support for bilingual education.

LANGUAGES SPOKEN IN NEW YORK

28 percent of this state’s residents speak a language other than English in their homes.

The most common of these languages are Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and French.

This state has the nation’s highest proportion of speakers of Italian, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Bengali, and Malayam.

Nearly one million New Yorkers speak little or no English.

There are over half a million households where noone over 14 years old speaks English.

Most non-English speaking New Yorkers live in New York City, where bilingual education is the favored technique for educating English Language Learners.

12,786,189	English
4,962,921	All languages other than English combined
2,416,126	Spanish or Spanish Creole
374,627	Chinese
294,271	Italian
218,765	Russian
180,809	French (incl. Patois, Cajun)
114,747	French Creole
113,514	Yiddish
111,730	Polish
102,105	Korean
92,709	German
86,659	Greek
69,959	Arabic
67,675	Hebrew
65,506	Tagalog
54,271	African languages
52,448	Urdu
41,378	Portuguese or Portuguese Creole
41,151	Hindi
34,569	Japanese
31,553	Serbo-Croatian
25,975	Persian
20,249	Vietnamese
18,421	Hungarian
16,908	Gujarathi
11,974	Scandinavian languages
8,575	Armenian
7,198	Thai
3,907	Other Native North American languages
3,353	Laotian
3,209	Mon-Khmer, Cambodian
179	Miao, Hmong
95	Navajo